Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020: Volume 3

Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020: Volume 3
Author: Ronald Cummings
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781108474009

The period from the 1970s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed. Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020 traces the region's contemporary writings across the established genres of prose, poetry, fiction and drama into emerging areas of creative non-fiction, memoir and speculative fiction with a particular attention on challenging the narrow canon of Anglophone male writers. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, the changing role and place of the writer, and shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Whilst reaching across language divides and multiple diasporas, it shows how contemporary Caribbean Literature has focused its attentions on social complexity and ongoing marginalizations in its continued preoccupations with identity, belonging and freedoms.

The West Indian Novel and Its Background

The West Indian Novel and Its Background
Author: Kenneth Ramchand
Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9766371512

An account of the emergence of the West Indian novel in English, this work provides valuable insights into the social, cultural and political background, offering concise and focused accounts of the growth of education, the development of literacy, and the formation of West Indian Creole languages.

Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature

Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature
Author: Janelle Rodriques
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-04-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429998651

This book explores representations of Obeah – a name used in the English/Creole-speaking Caribbean to describe various African-derived, syncretic Caribbean religious practices – across a range of prose fictions published in the twentieth century by West Indian authors. In the Caribbean and its diasporas, Obeah often manifests in the casting of spells, the administration of baths and potions of various oils, herbs, roots and powders, and sometimes spirit possession, for the purposes of protection, revenge, health and well-being. In most Caribbean territories, the practice – and practices that may resemble it – remains illegal. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature analyses fiction that employs Obeah as a marker of the Black ‘folk’ aesthetics that are now constitutive of West Indian literary and cultural production, either in resistance to colonial ideology or in service of the same. These texts foreground Obeah as a social and cultural logic both integral to and troublesome within the creation of such a thing as ‘West Indian’ literature and culture, at once a product of and a foil to Caribbean plantation societies. This book explores the presentation of Obeah as an ‘unruly’ narrative subject, one that not only subverts but signifies a lasting ‘Afro-folk’ sensibility within colonial and ‘postcolonial’ writing of the West Indies. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature will be of interest to scholars and students of Caribbean Literature, Diaspora Studies, and African and Caribbean religious studies; it will also contribute to dialogues of spirituality in the wider Black Atlantic.

Disturbers of the Peace

Disturbers of the Peace
Author: Kelly Baker Josephs
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2013-10-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813935075

Exploring the prevalence of madness in Caribbean texts written in English in the mid-twentieth century, Kelly Baker Josephs focuses on celebrated writers such as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott as well as on understudied writers such as Sylvia Wynter and Erna Brodber. Because mad figures appear frequently in Caribbean literature from French, Spanish, and English traditions—in roles ranging from bit parts to first-person narrators—the author regards madness as a part of the West Indian literary aesthetic. The relatively condensed decolonization of the anglophone islands during the 1960s and 1970s, she argues, makes literature written in English during this time especially rich for an examination of the function of madness in literary critiques of colonialism and in the Caribbean project of nation-making. In drawing connections between madness and literature, gender, and religion, this book speaks not only to the field of Caribbean studies but also to colonial and postcolonial literature in general. The volume closes with a study of twenty-first-century literature of the Caribbean diaspora, demonstrating that Caribbean writers still turn to representations of madness to depict their changing worlds.

Caribbean Literature and the Environment

Caribbean Literature and the Environment
Author: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813923727

Examines the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region. This book explores the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.

West Indian Literature

West Indian Literature
Author: Bruce King
Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

An academic critical history and survey of West Indian literature in English.

Situating Caribbean Literature and Criticism in Multicultural and Postcolonial Studies

Situating Caribbean Literature and Criticism in Multicultural and Postcolonial Studies
Author: Seodial Frank Hubert Deena
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780820462226

"Situating Caribbean Literature and Criticism in Multicultural and Postcolonial Studies is a pioneer in advancing the difficult but necessary argument of situating and centering Caribbean literature and criticism at the foundation of multicultural and postcolonial studies through an interdisciplinary, international, and intercultural manner, made possible by the author's unique multicultural and transnational interest and experience. Situating Caribbean Literature and Criticism in Multicultural and Postcoloniai Studies argues that Caribbean criticism - shaped by the region's socio-economic, political, and historical phenomenahas a more complex and significant marriage with postcolonial and multicultural studies than acknowledged by the international community. Caribbean scholars should not only seek to legitimize and publicize the marriage and its depth, but also expand the borders of its scholarship and protest its "disneyfication" and prostitution."--BOOK JACKET.